Author: M.V. Kamath
Publication: The Free
Press Journal
Date: September 7, 2000
There have been many
ma or movements in India in the last fifty years such as the integration
of the 'native' states, the Naxalite menace, the division of the country
along linguistic lines, the rise of the Shiv Sena, the DMK attempt at secession
and the decline of the Communist parties, but they have come and gone and
have been largely forgotten. But the agitation in Jammu & Kashmir continues
and like Banqo's ghost won't go away, try as hard as one may. In the last
one decade it has been fuelled viciously by Pakistan which would rather
face internal collapse but will not give up its obsession. One suspects
that the moment Pakistan gives it up, the very rationale of Pakistan evaporates
leaving it a target of international laughter and derision. It is apathetic
situation.
The state of Jammu &
Kashmir, it is well to remember, was a creation of the British who brought
it into being in 1846 by the Treaty of Amritsar. Squirm as it might, for
the next 101 years it continued as a handmaid of British interests submitting
to an annual ritual of humiliation laid down by the Empire. According to
Christopher Thomas, a former correspondent of The Times (London) it was
"one of the oddest political creations on earth" In his sharp and frighteningly
objective book Faultline Kashmir just published, Thomas refers to it as
"a soulless entity, an unnatural agglomeration with no demographic, cultural
or economic logic" containing communities and regions that had at various
times been independent fiefdoms and small kingdoms with little or nothing
in common like the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, Ladakh, Mirpur, Poonch, Muzaffarabad,
Baltistan, Nagar and Gilgit, whose people never asked for the state, never
wanted it and never loved it. It is over this that Pakistan and India have
wasted billions of rupees.
The picture of Kashmir
that Thomas draws is pathetic. On the one hand he speaks about Kashmiriyat
and how Hindus and Muslims have always been so close. Indeed towards the
end of the book he says that "Kashmiris, both Hindu and Muslim, are the
spoils of a war- that cannot be won because the spirit of the Kashmiris
cannot be defeated (and) five thousand years of history prove it". He gives
example of how Muslims have taken care of houses vacated by Hindus even
to the extent of trimming lawns. Oki the other hand he writes about how,
when he visited Srinagar in the nineties, "stunningly, there was not a
Hindu to be found". Two hundred and fifty thousand of them, he says, had
fled Muslim gunmen "in an unseen and brutally thorough campaign of ethnic
cleansing" with " Kashmir's tradition of Hindu-Muslim coexistence destroyed
overnight".
Thomas analyses Sheikh
Abdullah with cold logic. He notes that the "British encouraged the rise
of Sheikh Abdullahas a counter-weight to royal power and as a way of pressurising
the Maharajah to grant a long lease over the Gilgit region' of the state
which he wag decidedly reluctant to do". Gilgit was a key listening post
for events in Central Asia and strategically crucial to Britain if any
hostile military offensive were launched from there. One wonders whether
it was Jinnah on his own or under the influence of the British who instigated
the attack on Kashmir in 1947-48. This still remains to he sorted out.
Thomas says, in 1962, after Maharajah Hari Singh died, Lord Mountbatten
was telling Nehru that he "believed an independent demilitarised Kashmir
was the only solution". What tricks the British played on Nehru only historians
with full access to British records will be able to tell.
Thomas has little of
praise for Sheikh Abdullah though he conceded that the Sheikh for all his
arrogance" gave the Kashmiris what they had rarely known, viz self-respect.
The Sheikh was an autocrat, "an archetypal Kashmiri whose muddled ideologies
and ever changing political positions contained within them the essential
confusion of the Kashmiri personality. Thomas writes: "The Sheikh would
say one thing one day, the opposite the next. He would be a raging nationalist
in one speech and sound like a hard-line communist in another. He spoke
passionately for India and as passionately against it. He poured invective
on Pakistan but equally could indulge it..." In other words the Sheikh
was totally unreliable. He was also under the pay of the Pakistanis. Thomas
says that the Sheikh's "hunger for power was consuming". After he came
to power he forced through land reform legislation that dispossessed the
Hindu elite of most of their hoardings without compensation and handed
it to the tillers of the soil-Muslims almost to a man. "The move was backed
by no legal or legislative authority" Thomas adds. The ceiling on land
ownership was set at just under 23 acres and 150,000 absentee landlords
lost their property. Thomas says under the Sheikh "a new kind of repression
replaced Hindu Dogra repression". The Kashmir Prime Minister Meher Chand
Mahajan found it impossible to work with the Sheikh and wrote to the them
Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel: "The (Sheikh's) administration
here is on Hitlerian methods and is getting a bad name and the sooner I
am out the better. I do not in the least wish to be associated with gangster
rule......". The Sheikh, according to Thomas, "repudiated those parts of
the pact (with the Maharajah) he did not like" and "pandered to Nehru by
telling him what he wanted to hear while simultaneously pursuing opposite
objectives". More. According to Thomas "What Sheikh Abdullah said, believed
and did were frequently unrelated. in less than two years,. having made
one U-turn too many, he would be dismissed from office..."
The Sheikh was all too
often conspiring behind Nehru's and India's back. Delhi "seethed when the
Sheikh met Adlai Stevenson, leader of America's Democratic Party, in Srinagar".
Stevenson. had been dispatched to Srinagar by the U.S. State Department
to lure the Sheikh into asking for independence with promise of unlimited
amount of money. Thomas says that "Delhi began to suspect that Washington
favored an independent Kashmir". Rightly so. Future historians will find
out that the U. S. wanted a foothold in an independent Kashmir to keep
a watch on Soviet nuclear activities in Central Asia.
The -Sheikh died on September
8, 1982 but by the middle of 1990, according to official figures quoted
by Thomas, 62,800 families had moved out of the Valley to Jammu, Delhi
and Chandigarh over a period of little more than six months "often their
Muslim neighbours begging them not to leave". But adds Thomas: There could
be no question of Hindus staying on in Srinagar when notices were pinned
on doors and in the streets warning: Kashmir me rehana hoga, Allah Kahna
hoga (if you want to live in Kashmir, you must recite Allah Akbar). Comments
Thomas: "There can be no example in the modern history when 250,000 people
were herded out of their homes with hardly a squeak of international reaction".
As Thomas sees the situation
"re-unification of the old state of Jammu & Kashmir .. is probably
impossible" because "neither country (India and Pakistan), unless crushed
in war, is likely, completely to release the former, princely state because
Kashmir is' vital to the foundations upon which each is built" and "for
either to give up Kashmir would be to admit failure at a profound level".
Furthermore Thomas states that "the Buddhists of Ladakh do not want the
old state re-united, nor do the Shia Muslims on the Pakistani side, nor
do the Hindus of the Valley, the Pandits, or the Dogra Hindus of Jammu"
and, Thomas adds, "if the truth be told, there is not much enthusiasm for
it among the Muslims of the Kashmir Valley since they have no empathy with
Muslims any where else in the old state and would be probably more uncomfortable
in Pakistan than they are in India".
Thomas is quite sure
that Pakistan has misinterpreted the Kashmir cry for justice as a cry for
Islam. He insists that Kashmiris are different Muslims. As he puts it:
"They are Sufis and they have always worn their faith lightly; they not
only refused to a holy war, they also turned out to be strongly anti-Pakistani,
despite their tactic of raising the Pakistani flag to bait the Indian security
forces". And he adds: "They have never said with any heartfelt consistency
that they wanted to throw in their lot with Pakistan.
Even if there were some
inclinations in that direction, there are none now. It is almost impossible
in the villages and cities of the Kashmir valley to hear a good word said
about Pakistan".
Thomas notes that India
has turned Kashmir into a fortress "because it is besieged from without
and malcontent from within" but has not crushed "the grass-roots desire
for freedom". He abuses India of torturing thousands, rigging elections
and terrorising the people.
But for all this analytical
thinking Thomas has no clear solution in mind. Reading between the lines
one thinks he would like to see the trifurcation of the State but this
is not expressed clearly. How eventually the Kashmir issue will be resolved
is, at the moment, in the laps of God. But as along as Pakistan thinks
that it can bring India to the table force of arms, that long any solution
of Kashmir remains deferred. There is nothing that one can do with blood-thirsty
Pakistan, except, one supposes, have patience.
